The first day of the semester. Samford has a Jan-term, an accelerated short term in between the holidays and the spring term. My department didn’t have classes, so I got to work on things like recruitment, a new lesson plan, reading and so on. Today, though, is our first day back.
And so, of course, today was the day my printer decided to miscount the number of things I asked it to print. It also decided to jam about 90 percent of the way through.
“So it is going to be a Monday, eh, HP?”
My printer had nothing to see. Its gears were full of mutilated pulp.
Dig the paper out, successfully pulling out only microfibers at a time. I have some special chemical blend of paper that shears at the subatomic level. You can pull on this stuff for hours and not get it out from the reticent printer’s teeth.
With every passing year this becomes more entertaining to me. My youngest step-sibling is working her way through undergrad, but she’ll be done soon. When that happens I won’t be able to try to convince the new students that I understand their plight. “We’re practically the same generation,” is the implication, despite my silvering hair.
This has turned itself into a running cinematic joke in my classes based on a conversation I had with students a couple of years ago. For whatever reason the gag hinges on Spaceballs as the denouement of movie humor. I don’t have a real theory that we crossed some boundary in 1987; Spaceballs was simply the high water mark of post-modern film parodies, he said, hoping it made him sound sophisticated.
Anyway, almost everyone in the class said they’ve seen the movie.
“One day” I told them, “I will start a semester by saying if you haven’t seen the film don’t come back until you do. I will give bonus points for the first person that catches a Spaceballs reference.”
They all sat up.
“That will not be this class,” I said.
They slid back down into their seats.
Two posts on my school blog today. One links to a great list of necessities for every mobile journalist. The other asks the question “Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?” More and more we should be thinking of questions like that.
Flush and full, busy first day back. By tomorrow, perhaps Wednesday, everything will be moving at a normal speed again.
Except the printer.
